Posted on 12/08/2022 7:52:46 AM PST by george76
One expert told The College Fix students need to ‘adjust their expectations’
While 87 percent of students said that college is “too difficult,” the same percentage are studying less than 10 hours per week, a new survey found.
Intelligent.com, which regularly surveys college students, gathered data from 1,000 respondents, all of whom attend four-year colleges.
“The vast majority of students (87%) say they have felt at least one of their college classes was too challenging and should have been made easier by the professor,”
...
71 percent of students spend fewer than 10 hours per week on studying, and a total of 87 percent of students spend fewer than 15 hours per week hitting the books.
The survey organization found that about one-third of students who think they work hard fail to put in more than five hours a week into schoolwork. “But of the 64% who say they put in a lot of effort, one-third also say they spend less than 5 hours a week studying and on homework,” the group reported.
A former professor and longtime educational and cultural commentator said that the decline of educational standards goes back decades.
“These results say we’re near the bottom of a slope we began to roll down in the sixties,” Stanley Kurtz, an author at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a National Review contributing editor, told The College Fix via email.
Kurtz has taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.
“Students first need to adjust their expectations about the nature and purpose of education,” Kurtz said, responding to the minimal effort put in by students, despite many thinking they are working hard.
“In a proper college classroom, students come to understand that there aren’t enough hours in a day or years in a lifetime to drink in or grapple with the choices offered by the greatest pieces of literary, philosophical, or religious thought,” he said.
“Professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way should be rewarded with promotions, prizes, and praise,” Kurtz said. “Colleges should compete to hire them. Administrators who discourage, punish, or dismiss professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way—like the professor of organic chemistry fired by NYU—should themselves be dismissed and replaced.”
...
The professor referenced by Kurtz is Maitland Jones, who taught chemistry at New York University until the school forced him out for being too tough.
While only nine percent of students filed a complaint against their professor, “[t]wo-thirds say the professor should have been forced to make the class easier,” Intelligent reported.
Kurtz also expressed some concern for how this trend could hinder the future workforce. “Obviously, students coddled with reduced expectations for work in college will fail in the workforce, or corrupt it, or both,” Kurtz said. “That said, the solution requires more than demands for increased work and discipline—although that is certainly part of the picture.”
College is SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFICULT.
If you can't hack it, GTFO!.
LOL, that’s why I like electrical distribution design.
It’s a bunch of mostly smartass white dudes that are largely conservatives.
We don’t have to worry about HR nonsense.
You are right; they are “socially promoted” through the grades while falling further and further behind. It is impossible for a middle-aged person to compare his/her experience with these younger people because while our education wasn’t perfect, most of them have really had none at all.
Social promotion condemns the lazy / slow learners to future failure.
All I can say is...wow. No wondercustomer service is so poor in the working world.
I went to college without high school..I only finished 9th grade and part of 10th grade. I graduated college with honors and awards.
It wasn’t easy but neither was it overly difficult. I had to put about 3 hours of study for every hour of class.
There were only 3 professors who taught at the university level while two of those gave me awards.
It was not easy, but neither was it impossibly difficult. Some classes were watered down and weren’t worth the time spent in the classes.
Early grade school can go far in preparing students for college, but today’s teachers really need a different teaching philosophy. Most are not natural teachers and students are being ripped off.
I absolutely love education and learning but I dispise most public education.
The difficulty is often due to professors (usually teaching assistants) who don't actually know the material and don't know how to teach. College is a night and day difference to taking instruction from someone who can actually do what they're teaching you.
I've been there. Studying more wasn't going to help. I saw students walk out of classes in frustration because they couldn't understand the foreign instructor who had poor command of the English language and didn't know the material anyway. From what I see with younger employees, it's gotten far, far worse.
Back then one might find a good tutor. Now, I recommend checking the web. For example, for car gear heads out there, here's a link to "Engineering Explained", a YouTube channel owned by Jason Fenske. He not only understands the material, he can teach it very well.
https://www.youtube.com/@EngineeringExplained/videos
I'd add that folks like Hickok45 and Paul Harrell can teach much better than most college instructors.
Amen! I, too, worked full time pulling orders at a grocery warehouse in hot Alabama (no A/C in the warehouse) while taking a few courses per quarter getting a computer science degree (which included two courses of "college level Calculus" LOL). It didn't kill me. It allowed me to have good work ethic, appreciate the software jobs I had (easy breezy compared to the warehouse work), make nice money, and finish college with little debt.
I taught at major universities over 35 years. Students, particularly at GMU got progressively lazier and lazier. In particular, business students were always upset since the could take Management or Marketing courses and get “A’s” for doing nothing, I taught finance.
I took 21 hours 3 of my last 4 semesters. Most of these classes required 2 hours for every hour in class.
If I was smart, I’d be able to figure out what source(s) today’s younger folks will use to harangue yutes in 40 years.
I’d be rich by getting in on the ground floor...!!
Lets correct that headline: “87% Of Students Shouldn’t Be In College”
When I went to college, we were told that the expectation was that one hour of class time would involve 2 hours of homework/study time.
Thus if you were taking 18 credits, your workload would be 18 +36 = 54 hours per week of class+study time
I can recall my ‘university’ days in the late 1960s. The junior/community fad had not begun yet. At the U, Western Civ, Biology, College Algebra and Freshman Comp/English were called ‘flunk-out’ courses. Those courses were designed to be hard to flush out the ones who should have gone to a technical school or gone straight into the ditch-digger labor market.
I didn’t have much college prep from my small C-level high school, had some rough ‘adjustments’ in my first year in college, but managed to graduate in 3 years and 3 months. Some semesters I worked full time and took college classes part time, other semesters I worked part time and took heavy full (16 to 19 semester hours) loads.
Calculus was actually fun and easy for me. The math classes beyond that is where it got to be a challenge.
Sounds like too many kids in college who should be in technical school. Or hiding out from life.
I graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA but not because I was so great, but because the classes were so easy. Even the science classes like Chemistry were no big deal as long as you did the materials, studied and read. As a matter of fact, I rarely even started studying until a few days before an exam. But I paid attention in class and was prepared each day.
The only people in my experience who were making Cs or doing badly were the pot heads who didn't study at all, didn't do their assignments, or didn't come to class. Not ALL. I knew some Pot heads who were high performing, and one of the professors--a brilliant Philosophy professor from Poland, who had travelled the world and done everything you can think of doing (even becoming a Buddhist monk and living in a Buddhist seminary for years)--was real big on pot. He'd make edibles and come to class looking like the Dude from The Big Lebowski, even wearing sandals if he wore shoes at all. And despite his liberal tendencies, he respected me and everyone in the class who thought differently than he did (he even offered to be one of my recommendations). That aside, it's really really hard to not do well in college. You have to go out of your way to not study to do it.
Wait until you get to the real world, ya bunch of snowflakes. Related: https://youtu.be/fCMwlorNEZk
too hard, as compared to wut... please
I’m in my 50’s and still a smartass.
They also tell me to act my age. How do I do that? I’ve never been this age before???
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